All items listed and reviewed are available for purchase directly from Brickbat Books, although quantities are limited. Brickbat Books is located at 709 South Fourth Street, in the heart of Fabric Row, in Philadelphia.

Wednesday, June 1, 2016

June Events

Thursday, June 2, at 7 pm

Oxford Coma is a new reading series based in
Philadelphia. This inaugural installation's theme is NIHILISM... The
bleak, the black, the melancholy and misanthropic, and other splendors
of emptiness. All are welcome...or whatever. Poetry is dead.
And we have killed it. There is no value to what has come before us but
what value we've assigned to it for ourselves, and for the world. For
our world was born out of judgement and cynicism. For our universe is a
vast and vacuous void. And poetry is just as empty as that void, and
just as beautiful, and just as dark. Our words mean nothing. Let's make
it count.

Tuesday, June 28 at 8 pm

C Joynes is one of the UK’s most inventive and highly regarded solo
guitarists. Over the last 10 years he has recorded a string of acclaimed
albums exploring the fault-lines between traditional music,
field-recordings from around the world, free improv and lo-fi
experimentalism. His most recent album, ‘Split Electric’ (2016), a
collaboration with Nick Jonah Davis, finds him blending the brittle
ringing tones of electric folk with overdriven garage blues throw-downs
and lumbering muddy-booted psychedelia. This is his first US tour.
“An inheritor to Davy Graham; a lone operator prone to unexpected
collaborations, with a repertoire that crosses continents and timezones
with consummate ease, and dashed off with a phenomenal, yet lightly
applied technique.” ROB YOUNG, THE WIRE

“As much Conlon
Nancarrow and Ali Farka Toure as Blind Lemon Jefferson, the
compositional mind at work here can take apparently disparate threads of
modernism and ethnic tradition and treat them as though they were all
archaic blues styles learnt from dusty 78s.” BRUCE RUSSELL, THE WIRE

“His epigrammatic re-castings and re-readings of widely-travelled folk
melodies and rhythms from a variety of traditions suggest shared
memories that might be intensely universal while seeming strangely out
of reach.” KEVIN MACNEIL BROWN, DUSTED MAGAZINE

Jesse Sparhawk is a multiinstrumentalist, composer, and improviser
whose instruments include harp, guitar, and electric bass. His harp
study began at the age of 10 with then recently retired principal
harpist of the New York Philharmonic, Myor Rosen, as well as with the
head of the harp department of Eastman School of Music, Kathleen Bride.
Sparhawk has over 40 recording credits to his name performing various
instruments with many solo performers and groups, is a regular member of
the psych/folk group Fern Knight, and has recorded and performed with
acclaimed producer Tony Visconti.